Section 3 Openings Essay

            For this section, I had to watch a long documentary about storytelling and a TED Talk about comics and how they can be used to tell stories. Storytelling is an obvious theme in this section, but more so the idea of stories being able to be told in many different ways. The documentary showed the beginning of written stories all the way through many eras into the modern day, with movies. The TED Talk, by Scott McCloud, showed his ideas on how comics have changed form over the years, and how he thinks that digital comics should be. These two are tied together in that they both question how the digital age will change things. I also watched three TED Talks. The first one, which was my favorite of the 5 things I watched, was Julian Friedmann’s “The Mysteries of Storytelling.” This one was extremely interesting, as he went into all of the reasons that we tell stories. I was excited to hear him talking about George Orwell’s “Why I Write,” as I wrote a paper in 12^th grade all about that and how almost all writers write for the same four reasons. “The Poetics of Fiction” was a little bit less interesting, but still very cool. This one featured Elif Shafak talking about storytelling, and how different stereotype characters have appeared over the years. She shared stories about her family that were all interesting. Finally, I watched “The Shared Wonder of Film.” In this talk, Beeban Kidron talked about film as an educational form of art. This one was also extremely interesting. She spoke about how the program she works for shows classic and incredible films to young children in Great Britain. Not only does showing these films help to teach these children about how things are around the world, and what certain things mean, but they also help them to gain an appreciation for good film. All of these pieces of media helped me to see different ideas of storytelling.